the 57 and all saints
All Saints' Day.
It's a day of celebrating those who came before us: not just the big names, but your great-grandparents and their great-grandparents, and all those whose names we never knew, that exponentially expanding crowd of people it took to give the world that person known as you.
I'd say it's a good day to celebrate an altogether different kind of saint, the SM57.
What's that, you say? Why, only the just-about-most-used microphone in the world.
It's the Honda Civic of microphones, widespread and long-lasting and well-tuned and impervious to fashion as it is impervious to rough-and-tumble treatment. One of those rare instances of excellence rewarded by popularity.
Like every modern saint, it's preceded and supported by a host of others. Its official name is the Unidyne 3. The Unidyne that came before it is an American icon, the Rolls Royce Silver Shadow of microphones, instantly recognizable.
This Unidyne, though, the SM57, is invisible rather than iconic. It was developed just around the time that Helvetica was gaining ascendancy as a modern, neutral, inevitable — and eventually ubiquitous — typeface, and it serves the exact same purpose in the world of microphones. Like the gently curved kicker of Helvetica's R, the frequency response of a 57 is odd but fitting, a bit uneven in precisely the right way. It makes things sound good.
But there are others in the 57's past, countless thousands of others. A while back, John Gump wrote up an enthusiastic appreciation of the SM57, showing that every millimeter of it "is a collective result of the disparate knowledge of countless people: electrical engineers, acousticians, materials scientists, machinists, and manufacturers." The hours and years packed into every 57! Read it and marvel.
And the next time you find yourself in front of one, surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, cast off the chains that bind you.
It's a day of celebrating those who came before us: not just the big names, but your great-grandparents and their great-grandparents, and all those whose names we never knew, that exponentially expanding crowd of people it took to give the world that person known as you.
I'd say it's a good day to celebrate an altogether different kind of saint, the SM57.
What's that, you say? Why, only the just-about-most-used microphone in the world.
It's the Honda Civic of microphones, widespread and long-lasting and well-tuned and impervious to fashion as it is impervious to rough-and-tumble treatment. One of those rare instances of excellence rewarded by popularity.
Like every modern saint, it's preceded and supported by a host of others. Its official name is the Unidyne 3. The Unidyne that came before it is an American icon, the Rolls Royce Silver Shadow of microphones, instantly recognizable.
This Unidyne, though, the SM57, is invisible rather than iconic. It was developed just around the time that Helvetica was gaining ascendancy as a modern, neutral, inevitable — and eventually ubiquitous — typeface, and it serves the exact same purpose in the world of microphones. Like the gently curved kicker of Helvetica's R, the frequency response of a 57 is odd but fitting, a bit uneven in precisely the right way. It makes things sound good.But there are others in the 57's past, countless thousands of others. A while back, John Gump wrote up an enthusiastic appreciation of the SM57, showing that every millimeter of it "is a collective result of the disparate knowledge of countless people: electrical engineers, acousticians, materials scientists, machinists, and manufacturers." The hours and years packed into every 57! Read it and marvel.
And the next time you find yourself in front of one, surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, cast off the chains that bind you.
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